Law and Politics in Jacobean England


Book Description

This study is devoted chiefly to Ellesmere's career and writings as Lord Chancellor, 1603-1617. After an introduction to his life and career from 1541 to 1603, Part One is a study of his role in the legal and political history of Jacobean England. In order to place the analysis of law and politics in a broader context, topics discussed include economics, religion, social customs and thought, in addition to questions concerning the forms of action at common law, disputes between the courts, law and equity, and the political activities of Parliament, the Privy Council, and the Crown. Part Two consists of a critical edition of eight of Ellesmere's little known or unidentified tracts on the royal prerogative, Anglo-Scots Union, the Parliament of 1604-1610, the administration of government, law reform, the ecclesiastical courts, Coke's Law Reports and the Chancery-Common Law conflict.




Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England


Book Description

Law, like religion, provided one of the principal discourses through which early-modern English people conceptualised the world in which they lived. Transcending traditional boundaries between social, legal and political history, this innovative and authoritative study examines the development of legal thought and practice from the later middle ages through to the outbreak of the English civil war, and explores the ways in which law mediated and constituted social and economic relationships within the household, the community, and the state at all levels. By arguing that English common law was essentially the creation of the wider community, it challenges many current assumptions and opens new perspectives about how early-modern society should be understood. Its magisterial scope and lucid exposition will make it essential reading for those interested in subjects ranging from high politics and constitutional theory to the history of the family, as well as the history of law.




The Rule of Law, 1603-1660


Book Description

This book measures contemporary attitudes to the law - within and outside of the legal profession – to see how c17th century Englishmen defined the role of law in their society, to see what their expectations were of the law and how these expectations helped shape political debate – and ultimately determined political decisions – over the course of a very turbulent century.




The Political Context of Law


Book Description




Press Censorship in Jacobean England


Book Description

This 2001 book examines the ways in which books were produced, read and received during the reign of King James I. It challenges prevailing attitudes that press censorship in Jacobean England differed little from either the 'whole machinery of control' enacted by the Court of Star Chamber under Elizabeth or the draconian campaign implemented by Archbishop Laud, during the reign of Charles I. Cyndia Clegg, building on her earlier study Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, contends that although the principal mechanisms for controlling the press altered little between 1558 and 1603, the actual practice of censorship under King James I varied significantly from Elizabethan practice. The book combines historical analysis of documents with literary reading of censored texts and exposes the kinds of tensions that really mattered in Jacobean culture. It will be an invaluable resource for literary scholars and historians alike.




Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama


Book Description

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.




Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England


Book Description

Drawing upon a myriad of literary and political texts, Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance--the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one's civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament--evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects alike imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, Todd Butler here investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the various ways that early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this continuing immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, Butler examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth-century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with similarly close readings of religious and political affairs that similarly return our attention to how early Stuart writers of all sorts understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, oaths, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how--or even if--one can freely think.




Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws


Book Description

This study of Edward Coke's legal thought reinterprets the political and legal thought of early Stuart England.




Parliamentary Sovereignty


Book Description

This book has four main themes: (1) a criticism of 'common law constitutionalism', the theory that Parliament's authority is conferred by, and therefore is or can be made subordinate to, judge-made common law; (2) an analysis of Parliament's ability to abdicate, limit or regulate the exercise of its own authority, including a revision of Dicey's conception of sovereignty, a repudiation of the doctrine of implied repeal and the proposal of a novel theory of 'manner and form' requirements for law-making; (3) an examination of the relationship between parliamentary sovereignty and statutory interpretation, defending the reality of legislative intentions, and their indispensability to sensible interpretation and respect for parliamentary sovereignty; and (4) an assessment of the compatibility of parliamentary sovereignty with recent constitutional developments, including the expansion of judicial review of administrative action, the Human Rights and European Communities Acts and the growing recognition of 'constitutional principles' and 'constitutional statutes'.




The Politics of the Ancient Constitution


Book Description

The Politics of the Ancient Constitution is a close examination of the political ideas of common lawyers in early Stuart England, and includes important surveys of the ideas of Sir Edward Coke and John Selden. It provides an original interpretation of the lawyers' theory of the ancient constitution and on this basis it provides a novel interpretation of the basic structure of political thought and ideology in pre-Civil War England. In this way the book is able to make a substantial contribution to debates over the ideological origins of the English Revolution.




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